I don't understand all this fuss about testing.

[srican69]

And what about supposed good teaching that does not prepare students sufficiently well for tests as opposed to teaching for tests.


The basic issues are

1) we are using student performance on tests as surrogate indicator for teacher effectiveness. There is only so much a teacher can humanly do to inspire and motivate and inform the kids. Teacher evals are far more revealing than test scores. We should not tie the two together.

2) Tests don't give a complete picture of a students complete innate ability.. But rather serve as specific check points of how well do you have facts on your finger tips ,how well do you understand concepts and how well can you apply them or how well can you reason. So why kick up a fuss over what the tests don't do?



The best tests are essay type tests that involve showing detailed reasoning and or steps.. But these have to be graded by humans with detailed rubrics that ensure grading is somewhat consistent across graders. This will also allow for partial credit that stupid computers cannot provide. But this kind of testing on a mass scale is expensive and our fucking politicians will not pay for it.

Till then let's see tests for what they are.. An objective measure of how well can you do certain tasks in relation to the rest of the students .. And what areas need improvement.

AS IMPERFECT IT MIGHT BE... IT IS WAY BETTER THAN NOTHING THAT SOME ARE ADVOCATING FOR.

[TexasProgresive]

1. My teachers would think that they had failed

if a test they set did not fail a few students or if an equal amount did not receive and A. Although they would not have been as dismayed at no one receiving an A. They were hard task masters; they pushed us beyond the limits we set for ourselves.

Our final grades were a mix of test scores, assignments and class room participation. By terms end they knew everyone of us and what we were capable of doing. Standardized test can not do this- my grades were never top notch but on standardized tests I was an ace. I always scored in the top 95%.

[daleanime]

2. First of all.....

do you want to understand?

[srican69]

3. I don't see you making a herculean effort to make me understand.

[daleanime]

4. Tired of making the brave attempt....

when there's no hope. Thinking that's the case here also.


But do enjoy your day.

[srican69]

5. did not mean to diss you .. the only thing negative that I see

About tests are the breadth of topics that need to be covered by a set date that the teacher doesn't get time or space to cover the topics in sufficient depth.

What are the other issues? You can post links to your previous posts if you don't want to type.

[daleanime]

9. No problem, don't really know how far apart our views on this are......

in my personal opinion there are two problems with the testing mantra, both leading to the same cause.

One-It's a distraction. The time, effort, and money spent on the testing doesn't improve education. Doesn't even provide information to help you improve it. Just allows you to....

Two-Scrape goat others. It's easy and convenient to blame failing school systems/teachers for any problems we have(or think we have.)


Which leads to the cause, money. "You can't throw money at a problem...."

It's very simple, if you want better results-work/pay for better results. Better teachers? Pay them better and give them the respect that their deserve. Better students? Make sure that they are not hungry in school, that they have proper housing, and are getting decent medical care. Make college affordable, no one should carry a lifetime of debt just to get an education. Not when it benefits all of us.

There are tons of solutions available. All easy funded with just a small slice of the resources the MIC consumes.

[Jim__]

6. School Reform Fails the Test

An essay in the Winter 2015 issue of The American Scholar by Mike Rose takes a look at that question and some related ones. An excerpt:

...

Organizing schools and creating curricula based on an assumption of wholesale failure make going to school a regimented and punitive experience. If we determine success primarily by a test score, we miss those considerable intellectual achievements that aren’t easily quantifiable. If we think about education largely in relation to economic competitiveness, then we ignore the social, moral, and aesthetic dimensions of teaching and learning. You will be hard pressed to find in federal education policy discussions of achievement that include curiosity, reflection, creativity, aesthetics, pleasure, or a willingness to take a chance, to blunder. Our understanding of teaching and learning, and of the intellectual and social development of children, becomes terribly narrow in the process.

...

Public education, a vast, ambitious, loosely coupled system of schools, is one of our country’s defining institutions. It is also flawed, in some respects deeply so. Unequal funding, fractious school politics, bureaucratic inertia, uneven curricula, uninspired pedagogy, and the social ills that seep into the classroom all limit the potential of our schools. The critics are right to be worried. The problem is that the criticism, fueled as it is by broader cultural anxieties, is often sweeping and indiscriminate. Critics blame the schools for problems that have many causes. And some remedies themselves create difficulties. Policymakers and educators face a challenge: how to target the problems without diminishing the achievements in our schools or undermining their purpose. The current school reform movement fails this challenge.

Back when I was visiting schools for Possible Lives, critics were presenting charts of declining scores on SATs but overlooking the demographic and economic factors that contributed to these numbers—for example, more low-income and immigrant students were taking the tests (arguably an egalitarian development). Comparing our test scores with those of other countries, the critics also failed to consider the social, economic, and cultural differences. (Students in our nation’s affluent districts fare much better in international comparisons.) The proposed remedies included not only new curricula and tests to measure the mastery of these courses of study, but also more time in school, more rigorous teacher education and credentialing, and market-based options like school choice and vouchers. And the primary goal of reform was always presented as an economic one: to prepare our young people for the world of work and to protect our nation’s position in the global economy.

Since then, the reform effort has spread and grown more intense, and it continues to focus on public school failure. No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top have dramatically increased the influence of the federal government on public schools. Both programs require states to establish standardized testing programs, and federal funding often depends on the test results. If schools don’t meet certain performance criteria, they are subject to sanction and even closure. Race to the Top added a competitive grant program to the federal effort, requiring states to lift limits on charter schools and tie teacher evaluations to students’ test scores in order to be eligible for a significant one-time award of federal funds. Some philanthropies have also supported the reform agenda, and private advocacy groups have championed causes ranging from charter schools to alternative approaches to teacher credentialing to, most recently, overturning teacher tenure and union protections.

...

[srican69]

10. couldn't agree more but

Tests have their place in their curriculum and should. Not be perverted for any other purpose other than getting an eval

[d_r]

7. aseessment

I believe that it is important to conduct assessments with children. Assessment should be on-going an done regularly and routinely as a part of instruction. Teachers should look at the results of assessment and see where each child currently is and design instruction based on that feedback. I think it should be a recursive circle of instruction-assessment-revision-instruction-assessment and so on.

I do not believe that the standardized testing we are implementing accomplishes this for many reasons.

In the state that I live in, the legislature has mandated for the past few years that performance on standardized tests account for 15-25% (local districts decide) of a student's final grade. The tests were not designed as a grade assessment, and this is not a valid use of the measure. Similarly, the tests were not designed to assess teacher performance. Despite attempts in the last few decades to create tests that are not culturally biased, I believe that the tests are biased toward those with main-stream, middle-class experiences. When the test scores are used to reward and punish schools and districts, inner-city and rural areas are disproportionately negatively impacted, and it extends a rich-get-richer, poor-get-poorer model of separate but not equal schools. When you look at it in the wider context of attacks against the teacher's unions and also moving public dollars to charter schools, it reveals of a pattern of attacking schools who are fulfilling a mission of "education for all."

I only know this next part because my son mucked it up and was absent the first day they did this, and brought home the assignment that wasn't supposed to be brought home. My children attend a public school that has been widely recognized and rewarded for high test scores. I am not going to name it, but just rest assured that if I did you could google and find a lot of rewards. Recently students took the common core (renamed with state name) standardized writing assignment. The way the test works is that students are given packets of reading information and asked to answer a question on a computer. My son missed one day of the practice for it and brought home the practice assignment. I didn't know he wasn't supposed to, and had him do it for homework.

This was 5th grade. The practice test consisted of two essays to read that focused on the development of taste buds. The question was "write an essay that describes factors that can impact taste. Use Standard English." I told him to read the essays and underline anything that mentioned an impact on taste, and then include all of them in his answer. He wrote a paragraph listing those out.

The next day he brought home (again wasn't supposed to) the two essays again and a handout that was a breakdown of a five paragraph essay format. Paragraph 1: Sentence 1: Strong topic sentence that repeats the question in an interesting way. Sentence 2: Supporting statement for topic sentence. Conclusion sentence: List major headings of following sections. Paragraph 2: Sentence 1: Statement of evidence for point 1. Sentence 2: support for first sentence...and so on.

My wife e-mailed the teacher because the question didn't specify anything about a five paragraph essay as a response, just to list and use Standard English. I e-mailed that I knew that they had been working on five paragraph essays all year but didn't realize that this was that assignment and it was my fault because I didn't tell him to write it that way. The teacher replied that the assignment wasn't supposed to be sent home, that it was a practice for the writing assignment. They were doing three practice essays leading up to the writing test.

So here's what happened. The writing tests are submitted by computer off to be scored by someone hired through Craig's list for $15 an hour. They will use a rubric to check off each essay for every kid in the country. A point if the essay has this. A point if it has that. A point if it has this. My child's school has clued in on how to the rubric works and is training them in a format to get points on the rubric.

Now, all the essays go out and in a few months, maybe before the end of the school year, maybe not (last year they didn't get them back in time to include in the final grade as the state law requires), with a summary number for each child and a number for the average of the school, the district, the state. Those numbers will be easy for some bureaucrat somewhere to look at. They will be easy for some news paper reporter to look at. They will be easy for someone to type on the internet. Look, this school got an A, this school got a B. They will be great for real estate agents who sell houses in this district for 2.5 as much as those in the next district over, that school gets a D, not an A.

But what they won't do is tell anyone about what it is about my child's writing that my child should be working on. He gets a number you can compare with other kid's numbers. Yay, my child beat so an so. Oh the embarrassment, my child didn't score high. Whatever.

The thing is, they did THREE essays getting ready for it. For everyone of them, the teachers were reading them and giving them feedback. There was the assessment right there. What did they possibly gain by doing the standardized assessment and wasting that time and money? Nothing. Al the assessment they needed was already in the three essays that they had already written. There was nothing added here. I kept my son home the day they did the essay test because of that. It was stupid. Why make him have to do it.

And my kid is OK on a keyboard. Think about the 5th graders who aren't, who don't use keyboards at home. Sitting down to take this essay test.

In every school in our district but three - the three schools that get A's on these standardized assessments, they have made free lunch just apply to every student in the school because the percentage of children who qualify for free lunch is so high. The three schools that get A's on this assessment are singled out that kids still have to pay for lunch, because the number of children who qualified as so low.

So now, you take these schools were 95% of kids qualified for free lunch, who started out in kindergarten at a different place than those middle class kids, and in 5th grade you give them an essay test versus kids in a school that practices keyboarding and drills in a rote format to do well on the test. Then base the teacher's performance on that.

There will still be two more weeks worth of tests before they get out in May.

I know children at our my son's school who cry themselves to sleep at night during the week of the "big test" because they feel they didn't do well, and children who throw up in the morning on the way to school. And this is at the school where they do well.

Now go to the school where the kids don't do well. Great job, us. We are telling kids at those school that we don't think they are very smart and that they aren't going to do well. "Its great that you tried but you still did sucky." What kind of impact that has on their motivation and self-perception? How do you think that impacts graduation rates and dropping out and attitudes toward school?

And again, last year those results weren't in before the end of school, even thought they were supposed to be "rushed" because the state requires them to be a percentage of the grade. So we learn NOTHING about what an individual child knows or needs or how they learn. Nothing will be used to plan for that individual child who struggled with that given concept. It will just be used by those bureaucrats to summarize and classify, and to toot their own horns about what a great job they are doing.

On the backs of our kids who we are not helping to learn at all.

So yes, we should do assessment, assessment that is meaningful and useful and formative to curriculum and instruction.

But we should not put these sorts of stakes on tests that aren't completely capturing what a child knows and learns and are used in ways that there weren't designed for.

[Dont call me Shirley]

8. Teacher and administrative pay is directly tied to the tests, that's one reason for the tests.

The other is to fail schools so they can be privatized.

In New Mexico, kids are protesting, walking out of class and opting out of the Rotten To The Core PARCC tests to be given statewide next week. The schools are threatening the kids with punishments if they do not take or walk out of the tests. Parents are protesting and opting their kids out of the tests also.

https://progressnownm.wordpress.com/

"Naming names: These school districts are bullying parents into PARCC testing they can actually opt students out of

New Mexico is in the midst of a high-stakes testing showdown and its not just playing out between politicians in the Roundhouse.

Students and parents in Santa Fe, Rio Rancho, Albuquerque, Socorro, Las Cruces have all publicly shared their plans to opt out or walk out of new testing slated to start on Monday.

While some school districts are welcoming the parental protest, others (including some charter schools) appear to be misleading parents about their rights to bow out and refusing to give parents forms or options to do so in an apparent attempt to boost student participation (which helps prop up school grades)."

[quadrature]

11. standard-tests.... gets the teacher out of the loop of testing student progress

tests are needed.
not perfect,
but the best idea we have.

[csziggy]

12. Teachers are now teaching to the test rather than the subject

I've been told by teachers in schools today that they spend most of the school year teaching just what will be on the tests and preparing the students to take the tests. That leaves little time to actually teach a course that covers subjects in detail.

Another problem - some of the teachers who have gotten burned out only do the preparation for the tests then after the testing is done, they just baby sit for the rest of the year. After all, their entire evaluation is based on the test results, not on anything else they could give to their students, so why should they bother attempting to teach once the tests are over?

The mandated tests are expensive and money is pulled out of the school systems to pay for them. As a tax payer I would rather see the money spent on actually teaching rather than tests that do not demonstrate the true abilities of the students and that distract from any real instruction.

The final insult is that as they were used here in Florida, schools that did not show sufficient improvement in test scores saw their budgets cut. How the hell is a school supposed to improve their results when they lose money? Schools that are failing need MORE money to make improvements, not less.

[srican69]

13. tying scores to budget/teacher eval is styoopid idea that needs to buried

I think we should use a/v systems in class to record lectures in class that can be used

1) by students who missed class to review

2) to demonstrate the pedagogy of great teachers to train others

3) random quality checks of teacher performance based on student feedback

4) make lectures available to homeschoolers in their districts.. They pay taxes too.